In a Santa Barbara ballroom, a cell phone chirps with a digitized musical ditty, something from the eighties, a time when I believed in ghosts and love and religion.

A young girl answers the phone, red-faced and embarrassed because the master of ceremonies had just asked everyone to please turn off all cell phones and lap-tops.

This girl looks too young to have a phone, and it makes me wonder what happened on the nine o’clock news to make her parents need to keep such close touch.

Sixteen men were murdered in Beijing because they wore the wrong color jackets.

A scientist in New York City tells us that cell phones cause cancer in the brain, and shorten the attention span of white and black children, but Hispanics and Asians are okay.

I start to feel old when my students refer to movies less than four years old as classics, and I wonder what their children will think of me when they are my age.

Within the last few months my computer started making beeps and whirs, and the rep on the phone told me it was only trying to talk to me about its internal problems.

My psychiatrist tells me he will help the computer for a hundred an hour.

A child pornography ring was recently broken in San Diego, our sunniest city. It’s nine o’clock; do you know where your children are?

Girls with and without cell phones start disappearing all over the U.S. and Japan. The police officer at the microphone looks tired and his eyes are like blank screens.

My cousin Blake assures me that the eighties were filled with chemicals and missing children, too, though I was one of those children who believed in ghosts.